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The Scottish Government granted a marine licence to cosntruct the world's largest floating offshore wind farm off the coast of Peterhead.

The windy Scotland is ideal for generating power through wind farms, so it was only a matter of time, when a project like this would see the light of day.

According to a release on Monday from the Scottish government, the Hywind turbines project will be installed by the Norwegian energy company Statoil and will include a pilot park of five enormous floating 6 MW turbines with a generating capacity of 135 gigawatt hours of electricity annually – that's enough electricity to power up almost 20,000 homes. The park will be located approximately 25km off the coast of Peterhead, Scotland's easternmost point.

Hywind turbines will be attached to the seabed by "a three-point mooring spread and anchoring system", according to the release. Statoil also stated that the turbines will operate in ocean waters exceeding 100 meters in depth.They will be connected by an inter-array of cables and an export cable will transport electricity from the pilot park to shore at Peterhead.

"Floating wind represents a new, significant and increasingly competitive renewable energy source," said Statoil's executive vice president for New Energy Solutions Irene Rummelhoff. "Statoil's objective with developing this pilot park is to demonstrate a commercial, utility-scale floating wind solution, to further increase the global market potential."

Onshore construction is expected to commence in 2015/16, while the offshore construction is planned for 2016/17. Final commissioning of the pilot park is expected in 2017.